Lady Bird takes flight: How Saoirse Ronan became the most thrilling actor of her generation

The Irish star of ‘Little Women’, ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Brooklyn’ isn’t yet 30 but has already accumulated four Oscar nominations, while her new movie ‘The Outrun’ is already being tipped for awards next year. Geoffrey Macnab looks back on the impressively diverse career of a gifted child actor who grew up to be a consistently daring talent

Flown the coop: Irish actor Saoirse Ronan in her Oscar-nominated turn in ‘Lady Bird’ (Focus Features)

Meryl Streep was 29 when she received her first Oscar nomination. Saoirse Ronan is now the same age – and already has four of them. The Irish actor, acknowledged by the Academy for her roles in Atonement, Brooklyn, Lady Bird and Little Women, is a disconcerting figure. She doesn’t seem like a big name movie star. The paparazzi occasionally come after her (“Ronan looks jaw-dropping in daring outfit in rare red carpet appearance,” the Irish Sun wrote when she turned up recently at a gala event in Hollywood), but she is hardly a fixture in the gossip columns. Much of the public still struggles to pronounce her first name (it’s “Sur-sha”).

It appears to be by design. Despite all the accolades she has received, Ronan continues to appear primarily in offbeat indie pictures. She almost had a cameo in her friend and mentor Greta Gerwig’s smash hit Barbie. That fell through. Instead, she can be seen currently alongside Paul Mescal in Garth Davis’s sci-fi thriller Foe, which received patchy reviews.

In a few weeks, she will be at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals with her latest daring choice: The Outrun. Made by German director Nora Fingscheidt, this is an adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir of the same name. The story follows a young woman with severe drug and alcohol issues who leaves London, straight out of rehab, for the Orkney Islands, where she grew up. There she hopes to piece her life back together.